The Big Secret Twitter Doesn't Want You To Know That Might Be Killing You

Do you like that Upworthy (Upchuckworthy!) style headline? It might
promise quite a lot—but I’m going to deliver.

That’s right. I’m going to tell you the one thing on
Twitter that it seems like most people don’t know. And it’s bad for
them. And the solution to it? Added bonus: it’s bad for
Twitter.

And I’m going to do it for free.

One unintended consequence of Twitter, and it’s a real flaw
baked into the medium—(Medium? No pun intended)—is that it’s
a fast stream. It probably wasn’t in the first couple years! But
now you follow 600, 800, 1200 people. Your Twitter stream is
hauling ass.

And then came the notifications, which are multiplying
shockingly—”someone favorited a tweet you once looked at sideways
while creeping on your ex’s follower list!” So now, unless you’re
smart and you turn them off—for the love of cats, TURN THEM OFF—you
get a notification by email or by banner or even worse by alert
every time someone sneezes in your direction on Twitter.

And yet, it’s still yours. “Each user winnows the data
stream in a radically different way,” as the New Yorker
put it today. “One subscriber can create a virtual tabloid by
following only gossips; another can construct a bespoke community
of particle physicists and hot-yoga obsessives.”

What members—creators!—of most of these winnowed communities
have in common is one terrible thing. Here it is: they don’t know
how to not respond. That’s the secret. It’s the place where
everything on Twitter goes wrong. You don’t have to respond to
anyone on Twitter. Ever.

Freeing yourself to not respond is a gift. And you can do
it for any reason! Here are some reasons you can choose not
to respond:

1. You don’t care.

2. You don’t know who you’re talking to.

3. You have actual work to do.

4. Your cats are doing something more interesting.

5. You hate the person who’s tweeting at you.

6. You like the person who’s tweeting at you and you don’t need
to fight in public where everyone can see.

7. Because there are better places to procrastinate. Don’t you
have a chat room awaiting your input somewhere?

8. You’ve been sitting down for six hours straight and that
means you’re going to die early.

9. There are literally one million more reasons.

Recently, the famously argumentative Glenn Greenwald learned an
important lesson: he doesn’t have to respond to every egg icon and
#tcot spammer that tweets at him—and that’s a lot of eggs
and conservative wingnuts. He’s free now! Free from a life of
strife. If you survey his whole feed
these days, you’ll find him having a few side conversations, and
actually being quite funny, which is relatively new for him, but no
feuding, no arguing. Well, mostly.

Haha, that’s a good one. Anyway. This is quite a feat, with 275K
followers.

There is a total shitshow unfolding in the greater Ruby
community, which apparently, when you are a Ruby developer, you
constantly attend conferences. This seems counterproductive and
also not very fun, but what do I know?
This is the story of what happened to one woman at such a
conference. It’s not good. It’s really bad. Obviously, a lot of
people got involved in talking about it. Some less well. Many of
them did not need to say anything.

Being called a 'slut' 'whore' etc won't get me to take it down.
Not this time. For every troll I have 50 more supporters. That's
progress.

But there is a conversation that needs to happen, right? Here is
but one of many tough but important conversations that ensued, in
which David Heinemeier Hansson, the creator of Ruby on Rails, felt
compelled to involve himself by saying he wasn’t going to involve
himself.

Look! Everyone said what she or he had to say. An agreement was
not made. Unfortunate. Oh well. Everyone got on with life. No one
made a courtesy “end of conversation” favorite either.

Others took it to their blogs, with well-meaning and
mathematically interesting posts, which include unfortunately an
impossibility:
“women making sexist comments to men.” (There is no such thing,
just FYI.)

Some of these branching conversations online went to bad places.
And some became a veritable advanced placement class in what not to
do.

Not to “time-police” anyone here but, why? Why would you do this
to yourself, to other people?

What’s interesting is that it’s the white dudes who are all
flapping their hands, all upset that now there’s “two sides” in the
community. (There always were two sides, fellas.) All these poor
white dudes are really scared of conflict, it looks like. Yet they
are always willing to respond, making their positions ever-weaker.
You’d think they’d recognize their position of power and use it in
the traditional manner: silently.

@swombat@tundal45 Good classification. I
think there's little to be gained from speaking up in the middle
right now.

That’s right, for the wrong reasons. The best thing we can steal
is the privilege to be silent. Old white men have been using
silence for centuries, obviously. That’s because it works.
You’ll enjoy it too. And you’ll get to spend more time with your
animal companion of choice.